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Well I didn’t finish the game, but I did learn a lot, and I had really a good time.
Let’s look into what was happening with me and the game then!

The idea:
Platform shooter. On death the game uses what killed you to apply various character upgrades so you can deal better with hazards in future. For example, if you die from fall damage enough times, you gain the ability to fly. Get shot to death? You can reflect bullets. Blown up? Bombproofing!

-Even though I’m kind of sick of working in GameMaker it served me really well and fortunately I’m pretty good with it by now, so despite a whole day with no coding, I managed to develop most of the mechanics pretty quickly.

-Juiciness! After seeing this about ‘juice’ in games, I was inspired to try it out for myself. And it seriously helped. Even though my game still kind of looks like arse and the gameplay is far from balanced, it’s still reasonably fun because of all the extra little bits I put in. Obviously I could have coded more fundamental features instead of juicing it up, but I think this helped maintain motivation because it felt more like a game worth working on with that extra juicy boost.

-The mechanics work reasonably well, although they’re certainly not glitch free of current. But my concept (using death as a way to build immunity to hazards) was decent overall.

-Designing on paper is awesome! Here’s a link to a zip with all the notes I made if you fancy it!

The Bad:
-I have awful time management skills apparently, and spent most of day one seeing various people and dealing with personal tasks that I really should have organised better. Day 2 I lost 5 hours at a barbecue where I got drunk. Day 3 was actually really productive but by then it was too late. Need to organise the rest of my life to account for development time better next time.

-I didn’t like the theme, although now that it’s finally come up I hope there’ll be a better one next time. Still, the advice of ditching your first few ideas was helpful, as you can see above, they sucked! I kept going until I thought of something decent.

Overall:
I had a great time even though I didn’t finish. I wish I’d made a really tiny backup game though so I could rate some of these awesome looking entries, but I’ll have to try that next time instead.

This entry was posted
on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 at 6:45 am and is filed under LD #24.
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